Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures. EFHA Conference 2018

The paper looks at shifts within Clark’s own practice as a response to the European archives and institutions (both private and public) with which she has collaborated over 20 years working as a curator and exhibition-maker. 

In recent years the Polish fashion industry has experienced a renaissance. In Poland, the growing interest in Polish fashion manifested itself via numerous publications on the subject, formation of fashion schools, competitions, and shows. Additionally, Polish fashion designers became household names with some of them running successful international businesses. This process has often been turbulent, and even now the burning question ‘What is Polish fashion and how it seats within the European context?’ is not straightforward. Using case studies from the past and present, the paper offers answers to this question by exploring the five relevant themes across the Polish fashion industry - ‘National’, ‘French’, ‘Defiant’, ‘Artistic’, and ‘Recycled’.

In 2016 MUDE organised the exhibition “Down with the Borders! Live the Design and Arts!” presenting side by side the work made by a hundred national and foreign fashion designers and artists. With this exhibition as an example, the paper develops the museum's exhibition strategy to present fashion in interrelations with other disciplines and creative expressions as a form to reinforce its kaleidoscopic nature and contextualise it in time and space, analysing its representativeness and role in contemporary global and European culture and society.

In the 1980s, some European governments promoted designer fashion among other measures as the best way to survive the crisis in the clothing and textile industry. Advanced economies sought to maintain their leadership in creativity once the struggle for clothing production was lost in favour of outward processing. This paper explores how countries such as Belgium and Spain managed to remodel their clothing sector emulating the examples of France and Italy.

Fashion occupies a central place in the economies and in the imaginaries of the contemporary capitalism and has become, since the valorization of ‘creative labour’ in the neoliberal economy, a desirable professional horizon. In fact, fashion creative labour provides a desirable professional status despite the precarious conditions of labour. Through an ethnographic study among creative workers in Paris and in Brussels (models, fashion designers, stylist, journalists, interns...) this paper explores the ‘material translation’ and the spatial circulations – in the city and in private spaces – of the double geography that characterize fashion workers’ everyday life. Fashion workers circulate in the ‘overexposed’ spaces of the great luxury as well as in the one of the precarity made opaques. By focusing on the co-existence of these two antithetical social and symbolic geographies, the paper will also explore on the construction of subjectivities of fashion creative workers.

“ITALIANA. Italy through the lens of fashion 1971-2001” is an exhibition and a book curated in 2018 by Maria Luisa Frisa, Gabriele Monti and Stefano Tonchi, which reconstruct the history and the narratives of Italian fashion in the seminal thirty years between 1971 and 2001. A project like ITALIANA inevitably moves between the material and immaterial nature of fashion. It seeks to construct as three-dimensional a view as possible, associating the objects produced by Italian fashion - clothes, accessories, jewelry - with the imagery that has portrayed them and made them known to the world. A series of choices has shaped the critical approach and suggested themes and titles with which to organize still incandescent materials, bringing together, between visions and pragmatic acts, the qualities and the shortcomings, depending on the point of view, that make the blurry picture of Italian fashion. Identity,Democracy, Logomania, Diorama, Project Room, Bazaar, Postproduction, Glocal, The Italy of Objects: these themes are set out as a sort of open inventory, with bridges linking them in many different directions. These conceptual areas are fundamental to conveying a fluid image of the evolution of Italian fashion and the development of its characteristics. Like the exhibition, the iconographic atlas in the book is not organized chronologically: the themes are interwoven with one another in an assemblage that alludes to a fictional magazine, put together with the same aptitude for sampling and postproduction that characterizes and defines many of the finest, recent experiences in the landscape of Italian fashion. This experience is the occasion to question the possibility to define the qualities of Italian fashion through both curatorial and editorial practices.

As the first temporary thematic exhibition since the opening of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris in October 2017, “Yves Saint Laurent: Dreams of the Orient” will bring together approximately fifty high fashion designs inspired by India, China  and Japan. For the first time, these pieces from the collection of the Museum will be displayed in dialogue with Asian artworks borrowed from the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet and private collectors bringing new perspectives on the couturiers’ work.

The aim of this paper is to show the concepts and theories related to the creation process of a temporary exhibition. An exhibition is a collective endeavour, requiring specific skills as well as human, financial and creative resources. The complexity of the making up of an exhibition has increased in the past years, pushing major institutions to professionalize their teams and open to new, non-scientific disciplines, previously foreign to the world of museums. This complex process includes several steps, from early conception to final achievement, in a context where new technologies and media play a new key role.

This paper retraces my trajectory as a fashion curator. As practice made clear, curating also means to deal with a multitude of identities and, to some extent, to umpire them. This presentation focuses on how Arzallus’ experiences as curator at the Cristobal Balenciaga museum in the Basque Country, as a freelance curator working with international institutions, and now at Palais Galliera in Paris, have been marked by a constant negotiation between individual, personal, local, regional, municipal and collective identities, presenting also some of the recurrent difficulties encountered in her curatorial path.

Looking at representations of fashion in cultural magazines and satirical images from Germany, Great Britain and Sweden during World War I, this paper aims to discuss the crucial role of visual fashion discourse in creating and consolidating difference and power relations in political and national as well as class- and gender-based identities. The aim is to highlight fashion as expressive dramatizing and clearly differentiating costume for different (satirical) characters on different national and international stages and problematize the impact of visual stereotypes based on strategic contrasts in clothing and body-types in political discourse during wartime. Comparisons between depictions of fashion and dress in the war-faring nations of Germany and Britain and the neutral zone of Sweden, show significant variations in the discursive function of fashion as on one hand emphasizing and triggering political, racial and ethnic antagonisms between the nations and on the other negotiating national power struggles between the classes and sexes in societies dealing with the terrors of war while at the same time handling the rise of modernity. The presentation will synthesize studies on British Punchand its staging of a national theatre of the classes with distinctively dressed characters during the early years of the war, German Simplicissimusand its agitating visual stereotypes and caricatures of enemy nations, and Swedish Strix,where visual fashion representation mainly served a national war between the sexes under the challenge of modern women in Paris fashion destabilizing traditional national values.

Valerie Steele discusses the reasons why Paris has been the fashion capital of the world for more than three centuries. Drawing on the new edition of her book Paris Fashion: A Cultural History and on research for her forthcoming exhibition Paris, Capital of Fashion, she emphasizes the importance of fashion in the French historical narrative. Her ‘case study’ of Paris looks beyond the typical litany of great designers to explore the influence of artists and writers, milliners and actresses. Steele's work has contributed to the discourse on fashion cities and on the cultural context within which fashion flourishes. The idea of a Paris as a fashion city or fashion capital obviously has more than academic importance. Today, urban leaders around the world recognize that fashion can play a very important economic role. However, they should also bear in mind that this necessarily goes hand-in-hand with an important cultural role.

The conference involved world-leading academic institutions, archives and museums, encouraging discourse across disciplines, institutional and national boundaries. Through a carefully selected line-up of speakers, the aim was to reconsider assumptions about the place of dress and fashion in the definition of European cultures and offer new and critical perspectives on the role of dress and fashion in relation to many issues, as: individual and collective identities, European policy, colonialism and post-colonialism, cultural exchange and transmission, cultural displacement and appropriation, the fashion capital and nation, centre and periphery. The contributions also addressed heritage, archives formations and museums as catalysers of cultural discourses, as well as explore identity formations in Europe in a wider socio-cultural context, both theoretically and historically.

The conference was organised by the European Fashion Heritage Association in collaboration with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, The New School - Parsons Paris, IUAV University of Venice and London College of Fashion - University of the Arts London, with the patronage of the French Ministry of Culture. The event was also listed among the initiatives part of 2018 - European Year for Cultural Heritage.